Having seen this film referenced so often, usually in context of horror—I first saw it in Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments—I always thought it must be an obscure title, a one-off prototypical horror-thriller, perhaps an antecedent to Psycho and Cape Fear; that it had some forward-thinking ideas influential on horror vis-à-vis Mitchum playing the first proto-slasher boogeyman. Well, when I watched this again I was dumbfounded into thinking it might be one of the greatest classic films ever made.

As a film it achieves unparalleled greatness owing to the black & white photography alone and astonishing visuals that have as much potency as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari or the best of Orson Welles. Every minute or in the space of a few seconds you can see the most dreamlike, evocative, and haunting imagery put to black and white. I'm stunned by the use of light and shadows, fog, composition, and the very originality of the whole thing—between Love and Hate tattooed on a preacher's fingers, which Spike Lee copied in Do the Right Thing, to the frightening depiction of a serial-killer, the anti-religious undertones and the subject of violence against children. They say without Psycho we'd have no Halloween or the slasher, but it was all seeded here in 1955 with this film.

I can't believe they got away with showing Shelley Winters' corpse under water, bound in bed sheets and sitting so eerily in a submerged car after she was stabbed and killed off camera by Mitchum. Her fake body and pale face with blond hair waving underwater is one of the most haunting film images I can recall. This must have shocked audiences in 1955. It looks so macabre and real. It's more disturbing than other movies I've seen in the last 40 years with all the benefits of special effects makeup and gore in color. The sequence with the children taking a boat down the river against the night sky horizon and intercut with closeups of night creatures (frogs and owls) is so magical. This riverboat scene evokes illustrations from a children's storybook.

Mitchum's famous entrance for the children is when his black-hat silhouette casts a shadow on the wall of the kid's bedroom, punctuated by his stentorian musical theme. When he chases them into the swamp and fails to reach before they escape in the boat, he lets out a terrifying primal scream. We are in a new kind of filmmaking here, one that perfectly portrays a modern Brothers Grimm fairytale told from the perspective of two children. Yet the movie is not for children while having the structure of a children's fable. It's like taking a storybook for kids and adding murder, a Great Depression backdrop, and an undercurrent of menace and nightmare imagery.

An uneasy combination is the slapstick humor when Mitchum as the big bad wolf yelps after his fingers are pinched by a door or he becomes inept when confronted by the old lady with shotgun. When the tone fluctuates between dark thriller and cartoonish comic relief, it's a bizarre shift that somehow works. The ending is abrupt and there are some irrational behaviors and developments that lose coherence for me: the final showdown between Mitchum and the old lady, the townsfolk with pitchforks, the quick evacuation of a captured Mitchum from the police station, followed by the Christmas scene in the kitchen. Still, for the first 90 minutes it's been one gorgeous and tense scene after another.

I can't think of a more beautifully-shot black & white film with the best use of shadows that stand with Citizen Kane. Later I looked at the reception for this movie. When it came out, it flopped and was critically panned. No wonder: audiences were not ready for this. So much so that the director, Charles Laughton, stopped making films afterwards. That is a staggering loss that cinema hasn't recovered from. I cannot imagine what films were never made as a result. Based on this, his only film, he made one of the greatest ever made as far as I'm concerned.